Javed Ahmad Ghamidi / Dr. Khalid Zaheer vs Ali Sina

March 25, 2007Dear Mr Ali SinaLet me make another attempt to explain to you where you might stand, in my ordinary opinion, viz-a-viz the example of new moon I have been giving in the last few messages. The new moon, to me, is the message of Islam claiming itself to be from God and you are one of the persons who have to decide whether it’s there on the horizon or not. When I ask you to look at the moon, you have two possible obstacles in your way: a cloud cover and your unwillingness to see. While I do acknowledge that there is a cloud cover (and I really thank you for pointing that out), I am urging you to make sure that the factor of unwillingness on your part should not be an obstacle. I am aware of the fact that you have already rejected the possibility that the moon is there, but I still believe that you are an open-minded, truth-seeking person who has been swayed by some partly genuine reasons. To me those reasons are the result of incorrect information and misunderstanding.

Dear Dr. Zaheer,

What you say here does not really help. Anyone can say these things about his opponents. These statements constitute ad hominen and they are not a substitute for logical arguments. This is a polite way to say you are deaf, dumb and blind, or you have some sickness in your heart that does not allow you to see the truth. These were Muhammad’s favorite arguments. Unfortunately since Muslims read them in the Qur’an they think they are convincing divine arguments when in reality they are logical fallacies.

I asked you to give us proofs that Muhammad was a prophet of God. At first you said there are brilliant,undeniable,miraculous, out of this world proofs, but you would not give them to us. When I insisted you finally gave two:

1- Muhammad said he would be victorious, and he was; and

2- There is a mention of another prophet like Moses in Deuteronomy 18:18 and this must be referring to Muhammad. We saw how both these claims are fallacious. Osama bin Laden also warned in an interview a year before his terrorist act on America that he would do something big and, “you will hear about it in the news.” Then he did it. In his twisted Islamic thinking and the thinking of all the Muslims, this proves the truth of Allah. The thinking of Muslims is indeed warped. This is psychopathology. One reader of our discussion posted a message showing that this other prophet Moses was talking about was no other person than Joshua whom Moses was preparing to succeed him. So you did not give us any proof that Muhammad was a prophet. Now you say that my vision is covered with clouds and that if I purify my heart, I will be able to see what you see. These talks are not worth to be debated. I am giving you logical proofs that Muhammad could not have been a prophet. The proof is that he raided people in the middle of the night and after cowardly butchering unarmed people he shamelessly took their children and wives and reduced them into slaves and sex slaves. This man was a terrorist. No decent human would accept such a fiend as a prophet. Most Muslims do not know the truth about Muhammad. Many of those who are learning the truth are leaving Islam. It is sad to see that some Muslims have become so blinded by their zealotry that none of the crimes and evilness of Muhammad bothers them. It is they who have sickness in their hearts.

Do you have any other “out of this world” and undeniable proof to show that Muhammad was a prophet of God?

I have seen your article that talks about the errors in the Qur’an. I have read several times your anger at the way some Muslims are behaving. You also have historical references that make you believe in the peculiar perception of the prophet of Islam that you mention quite often. The kind of empathy my religion wants me to have for you, inclines me to believe that what you are going through, given your state of information, is understandable. The only point I am making is that you are overreacting at unreliable information and in the process refusing to consider the possibility that there is a moon on the horizon. Let me make another attempt to remove some of the cloud cover.

Islam does not teach you to have empathy for those that disagree with it. Can you show me where it teaches such a thing? Islam teaches you to kill them. So you are either playing taqiyyah (hiding the truth for a higher good) or are introducing a bid’a (innovation).

Muslims, like all other humans, have many good qualities but those have nothing to do with Islam. If Muslims are good it is despite of Islam. In your previous messages you were emphatic that those who disagree with Islam after being called to accept it do not deserve to live and should be killed. That was when you were talking like a Muslim. Now you are contradicting your previous statement. Obviously there is a battle raging within you, between your own humanity and your faith in the demonic cult of Islam. You know you can’t have both. You either must espouse Islam totally and lose your humanity or embrace your humanity and leave Islam.

You have mentioned in one of your articles I read that there is a contradiction in the Qur’an in that it talks about the possibility of God’s day to be as long as one thousand years and on another occasion as long as fifty thousand years. You have also mentioned that at times there is a mistake in the counting of the number of days in which this world was created. You have mentioned that the Qur’anic description of the location from where semen and milk emerge is scientifically inaccurate. You are also angry at the fact that the prophet of Islam married a six years’ old girl. And there are many more problems you mention in your various articles. I am sure it is not quite as much the apparent problem in the Qur’anic presentation as your anger that is keeping you away from appreciating that the contradictions and problems are only apparent and not real.

You are in denial. The contradictions in the Qur’an, as well as the questionable conduct of Muhammad, are very real. If they were not real you, or someone else could point out our misunderstanding. In my rebuttal of Dr. Naik’s claim that the Qur’an contains scientific facts, I showed that everything this book says is wrong and all of Dr. Naik’s claims are chicanery and false. All we need to know that Muhammad was not a prophet of God is one single error and we have hundreds.

Before I mention my brief responses to your concerns about Islamic teachings, I would want to inform you that my teacher, Mr. Ghamidi, decided not to deliver Qur’anic lectures anymore, back in the early 1970s, when he came across the possibility that there was a mathematical error in the Qur’anic law of inheritance. Thereafter, he devoted his time and knowledge of Arabic language to understand what the book was really saying. As a consequence of his research, he came to the clear understanding that the commonly understood version of the law was incorrect and that what the Qur’an was saying was error free. What I want to assure you is that you are not dealing with a bunch of gullible idiots.

Let us put these derogatory remarks and character assassinations aside. I don’t think they have any place in an intellectual discussion like the one we are having.

A few days ago a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door and we engaged in discussion. The husband told me that only Earth has inhabitants. Now this is quite illogical when you consider the size of the universe and the insignificance of our little planet in it. Only in our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are over 400 billion stars, each like our Sun, and there are between 400 billion to a trillion galaxies in the universe. How can one claim with certainty that only Earth has intelligent inhabitants? I asked why then God created all these galaxies and stars. He said, because he wanted us to enjoy their beauty at night. Then we talked about evolution and the wife said, “You have faith in evolution”. This fine couple was well dressed and I am sure they were educated. Now how can one qualify these absurd claims? The answer is faith. When faith enters, reason goes the other way. This is true for people of all faiths. That is the nature of faith. It simply kills reason.

The Mu’tazilis wasted their time trying to find harmony between faith and reason. They argued that intellect (aql) is enough to distinguish right from wrong. For example, we know instinctively that justice (adl) and telling the truth (sidq) are morally good. Therefore, God is under moral obligation to be just and truthful. Likewise, we know injustice (zolm) and mendacity are evil (qubh). Consequently, God cannot do evil. This philosophy precludes the need for revelation because it accepts the fact that humans are intelligent enough to distinguish right from wrong. However, in the Qur’an and hadith there are passages and stories that depict Allah and his messenger as unjust, evil and even stupid. How did they get around that? They conceded that there are certain acts that the human intellect is incapable of assigning moral values to them. These are only known through revelation and they become known to be morally good if God orders them, or morally wrong if God forbids them.

With this concession, the Mu’tazilis dug their own tombs. By giving up the precedence of intellect over revelation, they allowed irrationality to dictate over rationality and therefore rendered futile their entire argument about the harmony between reason and faith. This is like you and I enter into a partnership agreeing to be equals and make our decisions based on mutual consent, with one clause stating that if there is a disagreement between us, my vote prevails. This clause renders futile the entire agreement of equal partnership. In matters that you and I both agree, there is no problem. However, when we disagree it is always my word that rules. So where is the equality?

As you can see, the doctrine of harmony between faith and reason is rendered null and void the moment you give precedence to revelation. The Mu’tazilis vanished because the harmony between reason and faith is a fallacy. It is essentially an oxymoron. The moment you acknowledge revelation as a true source of knowledge, you deny the human intellect. The reverse is also true. If you give precedence to reason, revelation becomes superfluous.

The reason Muslim scholars of the 10th century declared that the gates of ijtihad (religious discourse) have been closed was because they realized that by recognizing revelation as the ultimate source of guidance, there is little left to reason and to discuss. All major issues of the faith have been resolved and no new inquiry is warranted.

Today we have a bunch of self proclaimed Muslim reformists going around deluding themselves and the westerners claiming Islam has also a peaceful side which they are trying to revive. They talk about ijtihad and y claim that they want to remain Muslims because only from within can they reform Islam. They are deluded. Islam cannot be reformed. It is rigid like fossil. You cannot reform it, but you can smash it.

If you embrace reason, you must eschew faith and if you follow faith, you are forced to abandon reason. Faith and reason are mutually exclusive. Their harmony is only a chimera and a fraud. Those who advocate such a doctrine are fooling themselves. These people will abandon reason every time reason challenges their faith. Reformation in Islam is misguided. It only buys more time for Islam. Islam must be eradicated and Muslims must be set free from this web of lies. You can’t fight one lie with another lie. To get rid of a lie we need to tell the truth.

You say that Mr. Ghamidi saw the mathematical error in the Qur’an in regards to inheritance and instead of admitting that the book is not infallible, he devoted his time and knowledge of Arabic language to understand what the book was really saying. Is that a rational approach? Once it became evident to him that there is an error in the Qur’an, it should have become obvious that this book is not from God. What does he expect to learn from a book that claims to be infallible and yet is riddled with errors? Then you say that “as a consequence of his research, he came to the clear understanding that the commonly understood version of the law was incorrect and that what the Qur’an was saying was error free”. You are losing me here. How can the Qur’an have errors and be error free at the same time? I don’t understand. You seem to be contradicting yourself. Please explain, how did he come to such conclusion?

Now I briefly mention my response to your criticisms: Qur’an clarifies that God’s days are different from ours. Like the duration of days of the moon and Mars are different from the days of earth, similarly the days (or more clearly durations) for getting different tasks done are also different. That’s why there is a mention that God’s day is the equivalent of 1000 years of our earth in one passage and that of 50,000 years in another.

There are two errors in this explanation. Firstly these two claims are contradictory and secondly both of them are unscientific.

I understand that the duration of a year is different in each planet. Mars’ year is about 2 ½ times longer than Earth’s. (Cheer up, because according to the Martian calendar, you and I are still teenagers.) Jupiter takes 12 Earth years to go around the Sun, while Saturn makes the trip in just under 30 years, Uranus in about 84, Neptune in 165, and Pluto in just short of 250. The Sun and its planets, traveling at a speed of about 240 km/second take 225 million years to revolve around the galactic center. (Doesn’t that make you dizzy? Poor Muhammad could not even understand these astronomical numbers.) The time it takes for each orbit of the Sun is called cosmic year or a galactic year. The Sun has completed about 20 orbits since the solar system was formed. For each orbit, it traveled 150,000 light years of distance. Our Sun is 20 galactic years old. It is expected to live another 24 galactic years before it exhausts its nuclear energy. It will die at the young age of 44. What will happen to it depends on whom you ask. If you ask the scientists, they will tell you that as the Sun grows old, its outer layer will expand. It will exhaust its hydrogen and then helium and its core will contract. It cools and become less bright. It will become a red giant star. Eventually the helium atoms in the core will fuse together, forming carbon atoms and releasing energy. After this phase, the outer layers of the Sun drift off into space, forming a planetary nebula exposing the core. Most of its mass will go to the nebula leaving it cool. It will eventually shrink to only a few thousand miles in diameter! At this point, it will be a white dwarf, a stable star with no nuclear fuel. It radiates its leftover heat for billions of years until it will become a cold dark black dwarf. By then it will be a dead star (replete with diamonds, highly compressed carbon).

However, al-Tabari will have none of this nonsense. He goes straight to the source of divine knowledge and quotes Muhammad who said the Sun and the Moon will go to heaven for their obedience to Allah.

The point I made was about the contradictions. In one place the Qur’an says that the length of each day of Allah is equal to 1000 earthly years and in another place it says it is equivalent to 50,000 earthly years. Now which version is true?

The truth is that both of them are absurd. This very claim presupposes that God is living on a planet that has longer days and that he is very much like us humans – bound by time. For an eternal God who is the maker of time, time should have no existence. Time did not exist prior to the Big Bang. Both time and space were created with the matter. Saying that God’s day is equal to 1,000 or 50,000 earthly years reveals Allah and his messenger’s total ignorance of the modern science.

Quantum mechanics, i.e. the physics dealing with the very minute subatomic world, challenges the conceptual primacy of time itself. According to the string theory, subatomic particles, the quarks, constantly fluctuate. These fluctuations are well understood mathematically and have been precisely documented experimentally. However, when it comes to time and space, on extremely short time intervals (about a tenth of a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second) and distance scales (about a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a centimeter), quantum fluctuations so mangle space and time that the conventional ideas of left/right, backward/forward, up/down, and before/after become meaningless. It is hard for us to even envision such a thing. It means that if you are a quark, you can arrive in a place before reaching there or be in two places at once. Consequently when the entire universe was condensed in a single point, so dense that mater could not exist, time and space could not have existed either. The singularity, the primordial point of existence had no dimensions and was time free. So as you see, saying the day of God is equal to 1000 years or 50,000 years is nonsense. Such talks are fit only for an ignorant man of the 7th century. They are certainly not fit for us who live in the 21st century.

In this author’s humble opinion, once we understand the world of subatomic particles, we would be able to explain thoughts and a lot of mysteries such as intelligence, creativity, imagination, telepathy, premonition, dreams and what we call psychic power and paranormal. Subatomic particles can appear as either matter particles or energy waves, meaning that they are made from pure energy. That is the substance thoughts are made of. Quantum mechanics may one day answer a lot of our questions regarding what our ancestors called “spiritual realm.” Everything has a scientific explanation. The subatomic world, which is the foundation of the visible atomic world, is yet to be understood. The answer to our enigmas is in the science, not in religion. There is no need to resort to hocus pocus, occult and divine to resolve anything. Science will eventually answer all our questions, including where we get our morality. Religions have been found wrong on everything that could be proven, such as the origin and the shape of the universe and things relating to this world. How can we trust their tales of the other world? There is no other world but this. Part of it we see and know, and the other part is yet hidden and we are only beginning to discover.

Today scientists are seeking to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) which would bring us the discovery of the “theory of everything.” As Brian Greene in New York Times writes “we are on the verge of another major upheaval, one that will pinpoint the more elemental concepts from which time and space emerge. Many believe this will involve a radically new formulation of natural law in which scientists will be compelled to trade the space-time matrix within which they have worked for centuries for a more basic “realm” that is itself devoid of time and space.” [26]

This is where the enlightened world is today. And where are the Muslims? They are busy discussing the duration of the day of Allah. How pathetic!

The poverty and the backwardness of the Ummah begin in their minds. They have nothing to do with Palestine or Zionism my erudite friends. These are all excuses. They have everything to do with Islam and the garbage that Muslims gobble in lieu of science.

The mention of the number of days in the Qur’an that gives an apparent understanding, if one were to naively count the figures, that God created this world in eight days, is because of the fact that the mention of creation of the earth in two days (41:9) is again included in the mention which clarifies that our earth was created with all its potential in four days (41:10). In other words, in order to arrive at the number of days it took for the creation of the heavens and the earth one should not include the two days mentioned in verse 41:9, because they have already been included in the next verse. Thus the mention is completely consistent with the rest of the mentions in the Qur’an that the heavens and the earth were created in six days.

Like your above example about the duration of the day of God, these statements in the Qur’an not only contradict each other and are mutually exclusive, they actually contradict science and commonsense too.

I already discussed this contradiction in my rebuttal of Dr. Naik’s story of the Creation of Universe in the Qur’an. There is no need to repeat that. Your explanation does not solve this contradiction.

However, this contradiction pales in comparison when you consider the absurdity of these verses. There is no point to rehash how the world has come to be. These verses only betray the ignorance of their author. Can possibly the maker of this universe have said such a balderdash about the universe? These are all proofs that Muhammad was an ignorant man of the seventh century. He had no clue how the universe had come to be. If these proofs can’t convince you, what does? How can the maker of the universe be so wrong as how the universe is made? What other proof you need to see that Muhammad was a liar? For how long do you want to deny the obvious? And you call ME blind?

As for the errors in the description of production of semen and milk, I agree with you that if the Qur’anic mention is inaccurate, its claim to be divine crumbles. However, before one reaches that conclusion, let’s be sure about two things: i) The Qur’an is actually making that claim and ii) the scientific investigation has made it conclusively clear that the information in the Qur’an is wrong. What if an objective investigation leads one to a different conclusion? Likewise, what if it is conclusively shown that the ages of Aisha, the wife of the prophet, were sixteen and nineteen years at the time of marriage and consummation of it respectively?

That is very interesting. I think you are seeing the light finally my dear professor. Welcome to the world of enlightenment. It’s time that you surrender to higher reason. Resistance is futile. You know the answer to all these questions better than me. Yes the scientific investigation has made it conclusively clear that the information in the Qur’an on just about everything is wrong. The function of the mountains is not to keep the earth from shaking with us. The mountains are not like pegs. The earth is not flat like a bed. The Sun is not revolving around the Earth. The stars are not in the lower heavens. The Moon is not a lamp. Sperms are not created in the backbone. The cow’s milk is not produced from amongst its dung and urine. Fetus is not formed the way the Qur’an says. The explanation of water cycle in the Qur’an is wrong. Animals do not have societies like ours. Ants do not understand human language. There are also other claims made in the Qur’an that are outright ridiculous such as pigs and monkeys being descendants of the Jews (or that Allah transformed the Jews into swine and apes), an animal will rise to call people to God, jinnis and angels, and many other asininities that you find in the Qur’an.. The Qur’an is a book of asininity. It is not befitting for rational people to call themselves Muslims. This name is an embarrassment. Soon, as these facts become known worldwide, this name will become synonymous to stupid as it is becoming synonymous to terrorist. Don’t call yourself a Muslim. Leave Islam now. It is embarrassing to belong to this religion of stupidity.

As for the age of Aisha, how are you going to show that she was 16 or 19? All the mutawatir (diffusely recurrent) hadiths say that she was 6 years old when Muhammad married her and took her to bed when she was 9 years old. There are no other versions of this story.

The other day I asked a Jew who had converted to Islam and had joined our forum, what he thought of the Qur’an’s claim that Allah transformed the Jews into pigs and monkeys. He responded, “I am not a scientist to answer that question.” Does this gullible soul think that maybe a scientist can explain this absurdity? Of course not! But he simply refuses to think about it. He wants to avoid the question because he knows that this could lead him to awakening and the realization that he has been fooled. That is painful. When I asked what he thinks of the massacre of the Jewish tribe of Bani Quraiza that has been described in detail in dozens of traditions and books of history written by Muslims themselves, he said that no mass grave has been found and also the traditions vary in the account of the number of people massacred, so the whole story is fabricated. This is what happens to one’s brain when one becomes a Muslim. One loses his or her rational faculty and becomes incapable of thinking logically. Doesn’t he know that corpses turn to dust in only a few decades? Billions of people are buried under the earth, do we find their remains after hundreds of years, especially in cities where people built houses and dug the earth many times over? Sure he does. It is simply not convenient for him to think. He likes to be fooled and will do anything to remain that way. Waking up and realizing how foolish he has been to embrace a demonic cult whose founder hated the Jews with all his being is painful. Truth is not painful; it is the shattering of lies that is painful. How is he going to face his friends and relatives, now that he is even wearing Muslim clothing and has a website promoting Islam? How is he going to explain the embarrassment of being a first class idiot to himself and to those who know him? Accepting that one has been fooled is painful. It is much easier to remain a fool and deny it. This poor man has no choice but to dig his head deeper in the sand and play stupid.

Doesn’t this apply to all those Muslims who read this site (faithfreedom.org) and see how Muslim scholars miserably fail to refute a single argument that we present against Islam and yet find no courage to break their shackles and set themselves free? Doesn’t this apply to you and to Mr. Ghamidi? What would you do without Islam, when Islam is the source of your livelihood? Breaking the chains of slavery of mind is far more difficult than breaking the chains made of iron. Been there, done that. I should know.

What distinguishes us humans from animals is our rational faculty. So do you see the tragedy? These crazy beliefs dehumanize us. Not onlydo we start babbling nonsense, we even start acting as savage animals and kill each other for an utterly foolish belief.

You justify killing those who reject Islam and say they deserve it while you are still waiting for science to prove the apparently absurd claims made in the Qur’an. Shouldn’t you at least delay the killings until the proof is found, just in case?

You say “I agree with you that if the Qur’anic mention is inaccurate, its claim to be divine crumbles” At the same time you express your wish that the proof will be found in future. So why don’t you leave Islam now and wait until the proof is found. If the proof is found, both of us can join Islam. If God is just, he will never punish us for not accepting something without proof. If he is not just, he is unworthy of praise. He is certainly not God.

For me to accept Islam, you have to find a new Qur’an completely different from the present one and a new Sira presenting a completely different Muhammad. I will not accept this Qur’an and this Muhammad even if you find one hundred miracles in the Qur’an. If you find anything out of the ordinary in that book I attribute it to Satan and not to God, because the teachings of the Qur’an are satanic and not divine. So far there is no indication that even Satan had anything to do with that embarrassingly stupid book. The Qur’an is raving of a psychopath and nothing more.

The day that the Qur’an is proven to be true, is the day that the Sun will dawn from the west. Actually Muhammad said that this too is going to happen. Here are the words out of the horse’s mouth:

Narrated Abu Dharr:
I entered the mosque while Allah’s Apostle was sitting there. When the Sun had set, the Prophet said, “O Abu Dharr! Do you know where this (Sun) goes?” I said, “Allah and His Apostle know best.” He said, “It goes and asks permission to prostrate, and it is allowed, and (one day) it, as if being ordered to return whence it came, then it will rise from the west.” Then the Prophet recited, “That: “And the Sun runs on its fixed course (for a term decreed),” (36.38) as it is recited by ‘Abdullah. [Bukhari 009.093.520Also004.054.421andMuslim 001.0299]

This is easy to verify. I live on the other side of the world, right beneath your feet. When the Sun sets in your neck of the woods, it rises in mine and vice versa. So between the two of us we have its itinerary all covered. How about you and I watch carefully and see where it stops to prostrate, then write down the exact time and with this we can scientifically determine the coordinates of the throne of Allah. I think that would be the greatest discovery of all times and would certainly make you and I go down the history and maybe even win the Nobel Prize. If we keep our eyes open, we might catch the Sun in the act of prostration. It can’t hide from us.

Silly scientists think day and night take place because of the rotation of the earth around its own axis. Why don’t they read the Qur’an and hadith to learn the truth?

A few more things might help: The fact that Pharaoh’s body shall be discovered in later times has been predicted in the Qur’an most clearly (Qur’an; 10:92). The book of God makes an accurate mention of the fact, as against the common contemporary wisdom of those times, that pearls and corals emerge from both sweet and salty waters (55:22). The book changes its style to accommodate the possibility that the details of a child in the mother’s womb are not beyond the possibility of human knowledge (31:34).

Qur’an 10:92 says, “But We will this day deliver you with your body that you may be a sign to those after you, and most surely the majority of the people are heedless to Our communications.” What is so miraculous about this verse?

Qur’an 55:22 says “There come forth from them pearls, both large and small.” What part of this statement was unknown to people of the time of Muhammad or any people of any time? Didn’t people know that pearls come in all sizes, some large and some small?

Qur’an 31:34 says “Surely Allah is He with Whom is the knowledge of the hour, and He sends down the rain and He knows what is in the wombs; and no one knows what he shall earn on the morrow; and no one knows in what land he shall die; surely Allah is Knowing, Aware.”

This verse actually is saying no one but Allah knows what is in the womb. Now, any one can make an ultrasound and determine the sex of the child. So the Qur’an is wrong again. I am surprised you seem to be helping me to reveal the errors of the Qur’an. Are you already on our side?

Also everyone knows that Allah does not send the rain. The rain falls because of very natural phenomena. If a stone rolls down a mountain, it is not falling because Allah makes it fall. It just follows the law of gravity. These kinds of arguments only prove the shallowness of the mind of Muhammad. The next part of this silly verse says “no one knows in what land shall he die.” Now does that prove that Allah knows it or that Allah is God? If so why he did not inform Muhammad of his own impending death? We know that Muhammad had no knowledge of the future or the past. When people of Medina accused Aisha of adultery the poor Muhammad was truly distressed and did not know whom to believe. Only after he decided to believe Aisha, nearly a month after she was accused, did Allah send down a revelation confirming what Muhammad had thought was true. Where was Allah all this time? Also when in Khaibar Muhammad wanted to find out the whereabouts of the treasures, he tortured Kinana. Why he did not ask his Allah to tell him where the hidden treasures are? When a woman whose male relatives were massacred by Muhammad prepared for him a lamb tainted with poison, Allah did not stop his prophet from eating. Only after he ate some and one of his followers fell dead, did he realize the lamb was poisoned. If Muhammad had any knowledge of the unknown, why did he use to send spies to the towns of his victims to see when they are most vulnerable to raid them? Couldn’t Allah or his angel reveal the unknown to him?

Some minor facts might also help.

Okay. We are now done with the “out of this world” and the “miraculous” and ready for the minor stuff.

If the readers pick a concordance of the Qur’an — the book that mentions all verses in which a particular word has been used in the alphabetical order — and count the number of times the word ‘yaum’ (day) has been mentioned, they might be surprised by the fact the total count stops at 365! Also the word ‘shahr’ (month) has been used twelve times. There are many other unannounced surprises in store to help you to ‘see the moon’. The only condition is that you should be willing to do so. I can assure you that the cloud cover would disappear.

These are not miracles. You can find numerical oddities in any book. Ivan Panin claimed to have discovered numerical patterns in the Hebrew scriptures and in the Greek text of the New Testament. His patterns involved counting of letters and words as well as gematria (numerical values of letters).

Michael Drosnin wrote a bestseller called “Torah Code“(also known as The Bible Code). He claimed words and phrases are found by picking equally spaced letters from the Hebrew text of the Torah.

If you have enough time on your hand you can find a lot of patterns in any book. When you have millions of star eyed believers with billions of hours on their hands, it is natural to find a lot of such “miracles”. None of these claims are worth a second thought.

One of our Muslim readers asked what in my view constitutes a miracle. I will answer that here.

If any of these so called messengers and prophets could have said something that would have been useful to mankind, I would have accepted that as miracle. For example, if they had shown how to make anesthetic, I would have recognized that as miracle. Imagine how much pain people endured when they needed amputation or surgery. If these self proclaimed prophets had told us about viruses and how to prevent contagious diseases, then I would have accepted that as miracle. If they had said that the Earth is revolving around the Sun in a clear language and that the Sun and the Moon are not “lamps” in the sky but one is a planet like the Earth and the other is a star, or that all living organisms are made of billions of tiny cells each carrying a code that is the blueprint of that organism, then I would have accepted that as miracle. There is nothing in the words of any of these prophets that was unknown at their time by their contemporaries. They simply rehashed the false knowledge of the people of their own time. Now their followers desperately try to attribute some hidden meanings to what these prophet pretenders said. For example, we often read Muhammad talking abut the “worlds of God”. We all know he is talking about the physical world, the world of the mythical jinnis, the worlds of angels, spirits and other fairy beings. I recently read somewhere a Muslim saying by “worlds” Muhammad must have been alluding to the multiverse. You know the theory that says beyond this universe there must be countless other universes that may or may not be similar to ours but belong to other time-space quanta and therefore we will never know about them. This theory is based on the fact that the same laws that made the Big Bang happen must have made other big bangs happen too. When nature does something, it does it in abundance. However, the Big Bang makes the need for a creator redundant. Poor Muslims do not understand this and in their zest to make the Qur’an look miraculous make claims that actually deny God. That is how believers fancy. They try to interpret every word of their holy book and find miracles in the most banal things to justify their faith in absurdities. Doesn’t the very notion of the Big Bang that so many Muslims talk about, reject the Qur’anic fable of creation?

These facts are there simply because the Qur’an says: “Say [O Muhammad], ‘O mankind, indeed I am the messenger of Allah to you all, [from Him] to whom belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth. There is no deity except Him; He gives life and causes death.’ So believe in Allah and His messenger, the unlettered prophet, who believes in Allah and His words, and follow him that you may be guided.” (Qur’an; 7:158)Khalid Zaheer(Words: 1191)

Facts are there simply because Muhammad says so? Who is Muhammad to say so? You have not established the authority of Muhammad yet. What facts? You have shown no facts so far. This verse is also a claim and not a proof. You are again engaging in circular reasoning presenting the claims made by Muhammad as proof of his claim. The answer to the question “what is the proof that Joe Blow was a prophet?” is not, “because Joe Blow said so.” What if Joe Blow was a lair? You must first prove Joe’s or Mo’s claim and only then you can use their words as authority. As long as you have not done so, Muhammad is just another pretender. Muhammad’s words can only be used as confessions against him and not as proof of his claim. This law applies to everyone and Muhammad is no exception.